Why Stealing Beauty Is the Ultimate Summer Movie

Today Liv Tyler turns 38. Her ingenue years may be behind her, but, at least from what I observe on Instagram, life seems good: since her divorce from Spacehog’s Royston Langdon, she’s happily partnered with the British sports agent Dave Gardner; she’s mother to two boys, including the adorable newborn Sailor; and she’s enjoying a bit of a career renaissance with a big role in HBO’s The Leftovers. But in honor of her birthday (and since Amy Schumer recently revealed to us that time travel really is a thing), I’d like to take a little sojourn back to the summer of 1996, when Liv was on the verge of turning nineteen and recently crowned Hollywood’s Next Big Thing.

Those of us who grew up in the nineties remember that Liv Tyler moment, when suddenly the baby-faced, lanky-limbed teen model became every director’s temptress of choice. First there was the 1994 Aerosmith video for “Crazy,” in which Liv’s dad, Steven Tyler, cast her, alongside Alicia Silverstone, as a school girl on the lam, doing naughty things like shoplifting gas station snacks, hijacking the pole at a strip club, and skinny-dipping with a hitchhiking farm boy. Then there was Empire Records, for which Liv rocked a mini-kilt and a cropped mohair sweater and lusted after the washed-up crooner Rex Manning, while A.J., a cute guy with a cardigan problem, quietly mooned over her in the corner. Initially considered a huge bomb—Tyler, at the time, said she was “pretty devastated” by the experience—the movie has gone on, over the years, to become a cult classic.

But the film that best showcases peak Liv, and the one that you should definitely carve out time to re-watch this long weekend, is **Bernardo Bertolucci’**s Stealing Beauty. Released in June of 1996, it tells the story of Lucy Harmon (Tyler), a nineteen-year-old American traveling to spend the summer in Italy with Diana and Ian, family friends who long ago relocated from London and Dublin to a sprawling Tuscan farmhouse in which they host a rotating cast of international artsy types for extended stays. The explicit reason for Lucy’s trip is so that Ian, a sculptor who carves the Botero-like statues that dot the grounds, can do her portrait. But she’s really made the transatlantic journey, funded by the man she grew up calling dad, to search for her real father, whose identity is encoded in a poem by her late mother (there is, of course, a magical art-imitating-life synchronicity to this). And she’s also there to rekindle the flame with Niccólo Donati, an inconstant Italian boy she met and fell for on her last visit, four summers earlier.

While Lucy searches for the mystery man who—the poem reads—killed a viper and fed her mother an olive leaf and tries to catch the gaze of the womanizing Niccólo, everyone else watches Lucy: Ian, who studies her from afar for her portrait; Alex, a British writer at the end of his battle with cancer, magically revivified by her bewitching beauty; Richard, the sleazy, philandering entertainment lawyer boyfriend of Diana’s daughter Miranda; and quiet, virtuous Osvaldo, who longs for Lucy as she obliviously pines for his undeserving brother.

Since the movie’s been out for nineteen years, I won’t hold back with spoilers. Very little actually happens in Stealing Beauty, other than a lot of Garden of Eden–esque frolicking in the preternaturally beautiful Tuscan countryside. There’s a scene in which the mostly middle-aged housemates all sunbathe nude, Hieronymus Bosch–style, by the pool. The Donatis host an enchanted midsummer soiree that feels cribbed from Shakespeare and will forever go down as the party I most wish I could have attended in real life. Lucy eventually identifies her father, sees Niccólo for the scoundrel that he is, and loses her virginity to Osvaldo under the shade of a tree so majestic it could itself have been the subject of an entire Terrence Malick movie.

But it’s not plot that keeps me coming back to Stealing Beauty every year when the days get long and the nights stay sticky. There’s something intoxicating about the languid, sultry atmosphere of Bertolucci’s movie. Summer is a particularly wistful season, at least for me, and the film, with a screenplay by the novelist Susan Minot, practically drips with nostalgia: the nostalgia of the world-weary bourgeois artists for their bohemian youths; for their bucolic view, now interrupted by the construction of a television tower; Lucy’s nostalgia for the romance she had four years earlier; for a joyous mother she never really knew; and an implied, inevitable, forward-looking nostalgia for the action unraveling in the present moment. There will never be another summer quite like this, the movie seems to say; you will never again be this beautiful, this carefree, this innocent.

Then again, it’s possible that what brings me back over and over is my own nostalgia for the era during which I first saw Stealing Beauty. Growing up, my family would flee Chicago every summer weekend for our cottage on the Michigan side of the lake, a house too small to hold us all. My siblings and I would spend long, sunburned days at the beach, followed by long, humid nights at the house of our parents’ best friends. Their place was grand, air-conditioned, and right on the water. Their other dinner guests always had exotic, intellectual backgrounds, professors and titans of the nonprofit world. Conversations would sometimes slip seamlessly into French, a language I never learned. We ate chips and guacamole, grilled salmon, and fancy bars of dark chocolate that were parceled out preciously at the end of the night. We drank huge quantities of wine. There was art everywhere, not sculpture, but monumental, violent canvases by the artist Leon Golub depicting towering figures in various stages of conflict. After dinner, the kids would head upstairs to the master bedroom, where we would splay ourselves across the bed and watch movies. One time—and I’m guessing it would have been the summer I was thirteen—that movie was Stealing Beauty.

I was too young to know who Bertolucci was, to recognize the name Susan Minot. I was too young, even, to fully understand the gasp of pain that Lucy lets out during the sex scene under the tree. Years later I would have my own magical summer in Europe, a brief romance that felt, at the time, enchanted (less so in retrospect). I would eventually have some understanding—I’m no Liv Tyler, but still—of what it meant to be an object of curiosity and speculation among much older people. Sometime in the future, I would even lose my virginity to a curly haired guy who vaguely, now that I think about it, had an Osvaldo thing going on.

But at the time, this was all ahead of me. And maybe that’s the feeling that I’m looking for every summer when I type in my iTunes password and pay whatever small sum it costs to lose myself in Stealing Beauty again.

So I’m writing this nostalgia piece about Stealing Beauty, with the loose peg of Liv Tyler’s birthday, and I thought I’d call you to hear your memories about making the film.You mention Liv’s birthday: She actually turned eighteen on set! I think filming started maybe the middle of June. Once we were on set in Brolio, I was there the whole time. It was a wonderful experience. I loved the director, I loved all the actors. Rachel Weisz [who played Miranda] was in one of her first film roles. She became a very close friend of mine. We’re actually working on a movie together right now, based on my [latest] novel, Thirty Girls. I’ve written the screenplay, she wants to play the part of the American journalist. We have a director, Haifaa al-Mansour, who made this movie Wadjda. Twenty years later we’re trying to make another movie with the Stealing Beauty roots.

Do you feel nostalgia for that time in your life?I am a book writer first, but I’ve always had a great love for cinema, and being on a set particularly with this masterful director, Bertolucci, and these actors—it was like a dream. So I’m not nostalgic for it, but it was definitely a magical time. People talk about being on a movie set and say its so boring. I was just mesmerized by the process. I loved it. I really loved it.

You’re primarily a novelist. How did you end up with this gig?It was through a friend of mine who was writing a profile of Bertolucci for the New Yorker. I don’t think it ever ran. Her name is Fernanda Eberstadt. Bernardo said he was looking for an English or American writer to work with him on an idea about expat life in Tuscany. He asked Fernanda if she’d be interested. She said, "I don’t know anything about the movies, but I do have this friend who is a real lover of cinema." I had studied it. It was probably after my second or third book. When [my novel] Monkeys came out in Italy it was, for some reason, a big success. Bertolucci knew my name. Fernanda called me up and said, "Would you be interested in working with Bernardo Bertolucci on his next movie?" I said, 'You’re kidding me.' Just to meet with him was thrilling. He said he’d read my second book, Lust and Other Stories, and in Italy they called me a minimalist. He said, “You are a minimalista, I’m a maximalist. Maybe I can learn something from you and we can make an interesting movie.” So we talked about the idea he had. We talked about filmmakers we loved. He had in mind Renoir’s The Rules of the Game as a kind of model. It’s one of my top favorite movies also, so we related. And then I basically had the master class in screenwriting. I’d never written a page of a screenplay before. He was very gentle about my ineptitude.

What was the original idea?A young American or English girl goes to Tuscany to visit English expats who live there. That was the first sentence. The second was: She’s nineteen and a virgin and on a mission to lose her virginity. I have to say, that was the one moment when my heart sank. I thought, Oh no, he’s an older man, he just wants to leer at a young woman. I asked, "Why that idea?" He said he’d been at breakfast with friends, expatriate English artists, and there was indeed a visiting girl, and everyone was whispering that she’s going back to start college and she’s determined to lose her virginity before she leaves. He said, "I couldn’t imagine what was going on in her mind, what that attitude was like." Frankly I couldn’t really imagine that attitude either. So we worked with that, and I thought, OK, maybe there should be higher stakes here. I created this character of Alex who was dying, and sort of solved the problem by making that mentality his interpretation of what Lucy was there to do. And she has another mission: to find out about her paternity, which, by the way, was written before Liv was cast. That was a real coincidence, because of her story of discovering her biological father [Steven Tyler].

Do you think Bertolucci deliberately wanted to hire a female writer to fend off possible perceptions of him as a leering man?No, he wouldn’t make a choice based on what he imagined anyone’s perceptions to be. He thought, Oh, we’re talking about something written from the point of view of a nineteen-year-old girl. Who knows better than another woman? I think that he wanted a female writer for the obvious reasons. I really wanted this character to not be like many female characters, who know just what they’re about, who are able to manipulate people with their youth and beauty. I would reiterate to Bertolucci: Girls have some power, but they have no idea how much effect they’re having on people. They’re full of questions in their own mind. That’s a real girl.

I will say Lucy was a little bit less outgoing originally in the script. She was a little bit more observant, stepping back. But Liv has an amazing shine to her. And I think Bertolucci wanted to use that shine. So we made her character a little more like Liv is, kind of receptive to people, and curious and warm and affectionate. As opposed to isolated and teenage petulant.

Were you surprised to hear from me? Or do you hear from young women who related to Lucy all the time?I do a bit. Even close friends of mine are like, I never knew you wrote that! A number of times when I do readings, some young woman will stand up and say it’s her favorite movie. It’s very gratifying because I really did want to try to make a more real young woman. She’s in a rarefied situation, there’s no question about it. But I wanted her character to be full of doubt and a little bit swayed and unsure and curious and all of those things.

There’s several poems in the movie. One of them, the one Lucy’s mom wrote about her father, got me excited about poetry. Did you write those?**You’ve given me goose bumps! That’s so nice. I did write them. The journals that you see Lucy writing in, that hand is actually mine. My thumb is in there. I do write poetry. I wrote one collection. And the poem that the mom wrote, about the green sandals, I wrote that.

I remember when we were shooting that scene, Liv came up to me after and said, "Is this supposed to be a good poem?" I thought, Oh lord! She said, "it seems sort of . . . simplistic?" So that’s very nice to know.

Do you ever re-watch the movie?I haven’t watched it in a long time. A strange thing happened while it was being made. We’d watch the rushes every two or three days. I saw the early cuts. I stayed very involved with Bertolucci on it the whole way. He was allowing me to see the process. I felt very excited about it the whole time. It was thrilling, it really was.

Then I saw the final cut, and I could barely see anything good about it anymore. But this happens with books also. You work on them so long, and 90 percent [of the time] you’re still interested. The last ten percent, you can’t even feel it anymore. You have to have faith. I think I came across it on TV five or six years ago and watched a little. And then I had a fondness for it. I have a thirteen-year-old daughter, and I’m waiting for her to see it. I’ll maybe watch it with her.

I was thirteen when I saw it. She’s old enough!She definitely could. She’s just not interested in anything I do. She’s like, "Mo-om!"